I have been trying to get variance shadow mapping to work in my webgl application, but I seem to be having an issue that I could use some help with. In short, my shadows seem to vary over a much smaller distance than the examples I have seen out there. I.e. the shadow range is from 0 to 500 units, but the shadow is black 5 units away and almost non-existent 10 units away. The examples I am following are based on these two links:
In both of those examples, the authors are using spot light perspective projection to map the variance values to a floating point texture. In my engine, I have so far tried to use the same logic except I am using a directional light and orthographic projection. I tried both techniques and the result seems to always be the same for me. I'm not sure if its the because of me using an orthographic matrix to do projection - I suspect it might be. Here is a picture of the problem:
Notice how the box is only a few units away from the circle but the shadow is much darker even though the camera shadow is 0.1 to 500 units.
In the light shadow pass my code looks like this:
// viewMatrix is a uniform of the inverse world matrix of the camera
// vWorldPosition is the varying vec4 of the vertex position x world matrix
vec3 lightPos = (viewMatrix * vWorldPosition).xyz;
depth = clamp(length(lightPos) / 40.0, 0.0, 1.0);
float moment1 = depth;
float moment2 = depth * depth;
// Adjusting moments (this is sort of bias per pixel) using partial derivative
float dx = dFdx(depth);
float dy = dFdy(depth);
moment2 += pow(depth, 2.0) + 0.25 * (dx * dx + dy * dy) ;
gl_FragColor = vec4(moment1, moment2, 0.0, 1.0);
Then in my shadow pass:
// lightViewMatrix is the light camera's inverse world matrix
// vertWorldPosition is the attribute position x world matrix
vec3 lightViewPos = lightViewMatrix * vertWorldPosition;
float lightDepth2 = clamp(length(lightViewPos) / 40.0, 0.0, 1.0);
float illuminated = vsm( shadowMap[i], shadowCoord.xy, lightDepth2, shadowBias[i] );
shadowColor = shadowColor * illuminated
Firstly, should I be doing anything differently with Orthographic projection (Its probably not this, but I don't know what it might be as it happens using both techniques above :( )? If not, what might I be able to do to get a more even spread of the shadow?
Many thanks
